Did you know that the Abu Ghraib Abuse First Exposed was the Rape of Female Prisoners?

[mod mom]

The other prisoners

Most of the coverage of abuse at Abu Ghraib has focused on male detainees. But what of the five women held in the jail, and the scores elsewhere in Iraq? Luke Harding reports

Luke Harding
The Guardian, Thursday 20 May 2004

The scandal at Abu Ghraib prison was first exposed not by a digital photograph but by a letter. In December 2003, a woman prisoner inside the jail west of Baghdad managed to smuggle out a note. Its contents were so shocking that, at first, Amal Kadham Swadi and the other Iraqi women lawyers who had been trying to gain access to the US jail found them hard to believe.
The note claimed that US guards had been raping women detainees, who were, and are, in a small minority at Abu Ghraib. Several of the women were now pregnant, it added. The women had been forced to strip naked in front of men, it said. The note urged the Iraqi resistance to bomb the jail to spare the women further shame.

Late last year, Swadi, one of seven female lawyers now representing women detainees in Abu Ghraib, began to piece together a picture of systemic abuse and torture perpetrated by US guards against Iraqi women held in detention without charge. This was not only true of Abu Ghraib, she discovered, but was, as she put it, "happening all across Iraq".

In November last year, Swadi visited a woman detainee at a US military base at al-Kharkh, a former police compound in Baghdad. "She was the only woman who would talk about her case. She was crying. She told us she had been raped," Swadi says. "Several American soldiers had raped her. She had tried to fight them off and they had hurt her arm. She showed us the stitches. She told us, 'We have daughters and husbands. For God's sake don't tell anyone about this.'"

-snip

Earlier this month it emerged that an Iraqi woman in her 70s had been harnessed and ridden like a donkey at Abu Ghraib and another coalition detention centre after being arrested last July. Labour MP Ann Clwyd, who investigated the case and found it to be true, said, "She was held for about six weeks without charge. During that time she was insulted and told she was a donkey."

-snip

http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2004/may/20/iraq.gender



I was trying to figure out a timeline for when the Abu Ghraib story first broke and was surprised to find this article. I don't recall ever hearing this. Read the entire article-it's appalling!

[KansDem]

1. I just posted on another thread Sy Hersh's report on sodomizing children in 2004

From Daily Kos, 2004--

Seymour Hersh says the US government has videotapes of boys being sodomized at Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq.

"The worst is the soundtrack of the boys shrieking," the reporter told an ACLU convention last week. Hersh says there was "a massive amount of criminal wrongdoing that was covered up at the highest command out there, and higher."

Some of the worse that happened that you don't know about, ok. Videos, there are women there. Some of you may have read they were passing letters, communications out to their men. This is at Abu Ghraib which is 30 miles from Baghdad <...>

The women were passing messages saying "Please come and kill me, because of what's happened". Basically what happened is that those women who were arrested with young boys/children in cases that have been recorded. The boys were sodomized with the cameras rolling. The worst about all of them is the soundtrack of the boys shrieking that your government has. They are in total terror it's going to come out.

It's impossible to say to yourself how do we get there? who are we? Who are these people that sent us there?

Daily Kos

These sick f*cks need to be put away forever...

[ellie]

4. Jesus, what

happened to this country?

[mod mom]

5. Some VERY SICK MFers!

[baldguy]

36. Our tax dollars at work

thx to the Bush Regime.

[Echo In Light]

9. Funny how even the newly 'left-leaning' M$M won't talk about this and other grizzly details

[tom_paine]

16. Corporate M$M does not permit such things to be discussed.

It is imperative to the Elite Ruling Class that the vast majority of Serfs remain ignorant of such things.

Even in the "Good Cop" phase of Good Cop/Bad Cop, which we are in now.

The same people who have controlled the nation since JFK got his head ventilated, likely under the direction of GHW "Poppy" Bush, and maybe long long LONG before that.

I'm glad they are giving us a little rest before the next set of Bushie depradations. Fatten us up again. Naive us up again. Get us all nice and juicy for the next round of vampirization.

Corporate M$M is integral to population perception control.

So, the rape of women and children at Abu Ghraib is simply not permittex to be covered, not anyplace where millions of American Serfs might see it.

Simple as that. NOT PERMITTED.

Or, in what is almost certainly the jargon within the plague of Corporate Consultants that now run the M$M, "The raping of women and children at Abu Ghraib is not newsworthy."

And woe to the job status and performance review of anyone who dares try otherwise.

[Echo In Light]

19. That's exactly what I was alluding to, and begs the question:

If the Establishment powers really want to go after the "architects," and this isn't more of the same smoke and mirrors, than WHY not disclose, as in, duly report on as a matter of significant, national importance, the exact details of this atrocity?

Answer: because it IS the usual smoke n mirrors jive

[tom_paine]

23. Guess I've got a bad habit of restating the obvious (at least what is obvious to most DUers)

Like so many, I am torn between my wanting to believe that Obama really does represent true change, that he is a brilliant and inspired chessmaster who is fighting the now massively entrenched PTB, the only way he can, incrementally and with flanking maneuvers.

Lest he meet JFK, RFK, MLK, Rabin's or Wellstone's fate (God Forbid).

OTOH, well, you know the other hand. It's daily lamented and trumpeted over much of the Lefty Blogosphere with bitter recollections of "dry powder", and other such.

I hope you are wrong, but I wonder if you are right.

I am going to keep hoping, perhaps naively, that it's brilliant chess through icremental flanking maneuvers. But I am also going to keep my eyes open, just in case it isn't.

Who knows? It's not out of the question that Obama, through back channels, got Spain started on this course, so he could get the ball rolling while having plausible deniability for having done so.

Did I just laud the idea of Plausible Deniability? I need a shower.

[ColbertWatcher]

20. We're the internets, we can make them cover it.

The GOP-controlled media follow whatever they believe to be "trendy." They like to cover popular YouTube videos and whatever is getting hits at Digg.

[bobthedrummer]

18. Yep, K&R

[mzteris]

2. eh - it was just

"women" - so nobody gave a damn. Women are just for sex and to the victor go the spoils of war. The winning soldiers have been raping women since man first picked up a club.

No one would have been outraged anyway. Only the rape of men would be shocking. But only 'cause gay sex is sick and of course all our soldiers are real manly men. . .


















pardon me while I































:puke: :puke: :puke: :puke:

[mod mom]

3. Their crimes? "merely because of who they are married to"

"The women appear to have been arrested in violation of international law - not because of anything they have done, but merely because of who they are married to, and their potential intelligence value. US officials have previously acknowledged detaining Iraqi women in the hope of convincing male relatives to provide information; when US soldiers raid a house and fail to find a male suspect, they will frequently take away his wife or daughter instead."


These were not the wives of terrorists but of the Iraqis that the * administration were trying to pin 9/11 on!

[Hell Hath No Fury]

6. I also remember...

A report about a note found from a female inmate that essentially begged someone to kill them because of what was going on in Abu Ghraib.

It was shortly after that the prison was bombed the first time.

And then the real efforts against the US soldiers were started. :(

[Tierra_y_Libertad]

7. Well, the poor, misundertood, rapists were under a lot of pressure...

they certainly shouldn't be punished for their unconscious responses because, well, they're just young men in a stressful situation, and who knows how anyone might react if you were a horny soldier in a difficult position when being confronted by a helpless woman. How could they know it was wrong?

:sarcasm:

[uppityperson]

10. Indeed. They should just let poor Steven Green go also.

:sarcasm:

It is sad when I feel the need to add the sarcasm thingie

[bvar22]

15. They tortured "in Good Faith"....

...so its all good!

[MisterP]

22. they were skeeeeert! what would you do if some people whose country you invaded

drove a car by you?
huh?!

[Spazito]

8. Here is a thread from 2004 that the link to that article and much more....

It is a VERY DIFFICULT THREAD to revisit but it is important, imo:

http://www.democraticunderground.com/discuss/duboard.php?az=show_topic&forum=102&topic_id=570508#570546

Edited to add:

From an article published in the Chicago Tribune in 2004:

Mike Dorning, "GI: Boy mistreated to get dad to talk," Chicago Tribune, May 20, 2004:
"A military intelligence analyst who recently completed duty at Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq said Wednesday that the 16-year-old son of a detainee there was abused by U.S. soldiers to break his father's resistance to interrogators.
"The analyst said the teenager was stripped naked, thrown in the back of an open truck, driven around in the cold night air, splattered with mud and then presented to his father at Abu Ghraib, the prison at the center of the scandal over abuse of Iraqi detainees.
"Upon seeing his frail and frightened son, the prisoner broke down and cried and told interrogators he would tell them whatever they wanted, the analyst said."


http://www.sourcewatch.org/index.php?title=Abu_Ghraib:_Interrogation_Methods_and_Legal_Issues


Here is a thread, from 2004 discussing the Chicago Tribune article:

http://www.democraticunderground.com/discuss/duboard.php?az=show_topic&forum=102&topic_id=568629

[mod mom]

13. horrid.

Tie this to the top and PROSECUTE.

I remember being appalled enough to visit a congresswomen's office (Deborah Pryce then R-OH) with a number of other activists, but I haven't recalled all the sickening details.

So the Iraqi's bombed their own people at the prisoners requests. It tells you how horrid things were.

[bdamomma]

11. I would like to see those pictures that they hid away from all of us too.

rumsfeld must have been getting off on them.

[pleah]

12. You won't hear that on MSN.

They can't let the sheeple know they have been cheer leading for 8 years and not reporting the real news.

This is beyond disgusting. For Gen. Karpinski to say that the guards convicted for Abu Ghraib were scape goated, I don't think that is entirely true. They were clearly guilty of torture, imo. The higher ups were not punished, yet.

[Tempest]

14. The rape of female prisoners was why insurgents were firing mortars into the prison

It was also the reason why the four U.S. contractors were dragged through the streets.


Word was getting out to Iraqis (long before Americans found out) about the rapes in the prison and there were appeals from the women prisoners to be killed from the shame of the rapes. The mortars were fired into the women's section of the prison in an attempt to honor their wishes.

The U.S. media played it as if the mortars were intended for the U.S. troops and other Americans (CIA and contractors) in the prisons.

[EFerrari]

25. Abu Ghraib is about 30-40 Km from Falujah. The families of those prisoners

sat outside waiting for word or for justice for a year before the insurgency exploded.

[Tempest]

27. The mortar fire into the prison was before the insurgency exploded

Seymour Hersh reported on it during January-February 2004.

The insurgency didn't "explode" until early summer.

[EFerrari]

28. Right. So between the beginning of the abuse and torture at Abu Ghraib

and the insurgency, there were incrementally escalating protests of different kinds. And they were all ignored.

[lazyriver]

17. Sickening and shameful. How can we move forward as a nation

if we let such horrible crimes go unpunished? I don't care who you are in "the chain of command" and I don't care whose fucking orders you were following. If you're raping women, ordering rape, or looking the other way while it happens, your ass belongs in jail...for life...at the least.

[pansypoo53219]

21. GEORGEE

rape rooms. guuess that's when he stopped mentioning saddam's.

[truedelphi]

24. mad mom, one of the first pieces of information in American news

Regarding Abu Gharib Came from Mary Mapes, who was over there under the direction of Dan Rather May 2004.

For her work on Abu Gharibb, Mapes shared a Peabody award with Rather, spring of 2005.

Unfortunately by then, the duo had already been shit canned by CBS - supposedly because of the "falsification and non-substantiation" of her work on George W Bush going AWOL. But probably more because her next piece, scheduled by Rather to run in October 2004, was to involve a story relating to how the US election system was broken.

Due to the nature of the results for the Nov 2004 election, the Powers that Be had to suppress her work on that story. It took more or less blacklisting her professionally to do that. But what is one journalist's reputation to the Powers that Be?

And "Sixty Minutes II" was also shit canned - supposedly for poor ratings? But enough people were watching it to keep it on. Again, the nature of the news coming out of "Sixty Minutes II" was simply too incendiary - including very critical pieces on Gitmo.

[nadinbrzezinski]

26. Yep, just like Central America realize

for these women their lives are over

Why sexual assault is a weapon of terror and compliance

[genna]

29. Despicable. If there are photographs ANYWHERE, they need to be released.

Also, we can't move forward on rape.

"But among the 1,800 digital photographs taken by US guards inside Abu Ghraib there are, according to Taguba's report, images of a US military policeman "having sex" with an Iraqi woman."

[Psychic Consortium]

44. So many pictures taken of all the torture. There must be documentation of this as well.

Makes one wonder why so many pictures of all of it.

[southerncrone]

47. Can't help but wonder if these photos weren't a "desired by-product" by

the sadists that authorized & seemingly promoted all this terrorism & torture.....additions to their "film collections" for their ongoing entertainment purposes.

A bunch of sicko MFs! :puke:

[Psychic Consortium]

48. Yes, all these photos were taken for clear and specific reasons.

These reasons are crucial pieces of the puzzle.
And yes the horrific psychopathic sadistic part of this is becoming more evident. But there will be other reasons as well.

[Psychic Consortium]

30. What can be done to help these women and children?

Can someone get this info to KO or Rachel M? Someone needs to speak out for these women, if they won't be harmed by the story going public.

And what has become of the children produced by these rapes?

[mod mom]

32. I sent it to Rachel. With the Repubs attempting to make torture JUST "enhanced

interrogation" I think it would be wise to bring up incidents like this at this time.

Personally I never heard this story of the women (although I heard the horrific tales about children) at the time. I was working full time attempting to get Kerry elected, and spent little time on the computer. I didn't come to DU, which is a plethora of information you don't normally hear. I would think that if journalists would bring up this information to the public and confront the GOP torture deniers, the level of public outrage would drastically increase.

[Psychic Consortium]

33. Thank you very much Mod Mom.

I agree that we have to try to help these women in any way we can. And also bring to light that water boarding was not the only torture method. At some point the information coming to light has to hit critical mass with the public. The energy will shift for America to do the right thing.

I recall this information when it was first published years ago. My heart went out to these women and they have been in my daily prayers. Everything else fell on deaf ears. But the time is right now for us to make as much noise as we can.

I wish they could know that many American women are heart broken and horrified to hear about their stories.

[mod mom]

34. Sadly I believe many Americans have been desensitized to waterboarding. Hearing these

other abuses will hopefully strike outrage in their hearts.

I don't understand why every American isn't totally appalled. It's beyond my comprehension!

[Psychic Consortium]

35. Yes on all points. If these events do not horrify Americans, we are lost

on so many levels. We are sunk as a nation.

Are we a country of sociopaths who have no conscience,
no empathy? We murder, torture, rape innocent women
and children without a shred of remorse?

[Psychic Consortium]

40. What about KO and the Rude Pundit?

Would it help to contact them?

[mod mom]

41. I no longer have an email to KO and never had to RP. Please forward if you do.

:hi:

[Psychic Consortium]

42. Will try and find their adddies....and get the info to them.

[Psychic Consortium]

43. I just sent the link to KO and Rude asking them for help.

Fingers crossed that something will be done.

[ihavenobias]

31. K & R n/t

[Odin2005]

37. I say turn the rapists over to the Iraqis and let them make the monsters wish...

...they were dead. :grr:

[lunatica]

38. If several women prisoners were pregnant I want to know what happened to the babies

I don't think it's possible that they were simply accepted by the women's families. Not in a country where honor killing is practiced, even if by a minority. What happened to the babies?

[Psychic Consortium]

39. Yes, those babies are very much on my mind as well.

If still alive, they are not faring very well I would assume.

[ShortnFiery]

46. War babies are not welcomed anywhere. This culture is no more savage than

our own would be given the checkered history of invasions and occupations they have endured. :(

[Psychic Consortium]

49. I fear you are correct. Their fate cannot be good. I wish we could help them.

[ShortnFiery]

45. I blame the Executive Branch first and foremost for this - The TONE is set from the top down.

:grr: :nuke:

[Psychic Consortium]

50. Yes the tone was clear from the top, there is no doubt.

Iraqis are to be treated like subhumans, things,
degraded, humiliated and made to feel a great deal of pain.
The leaders of our country were sociopaths, sadistic ones.

I thank God for Obama every day, a man who can move this country forward.

[Sultana]

51. Ashamed to be American

:-(

Off to the Hague with all these fuckers and the Bush Administration.